can I, in Royce’s phrase, “choose to forget”? how can I “become a conscious and deliberate traitor”?[1] The truth is that Royce seems to discuss sin psychologically and ethically rather than metaphysically. And the result is that we have in his pages a masterly psychological analysis of that violation of moral loyalty which he calls sin[2] and which he will not have smoothed away or ignored. Organically related to this conception of sin[3] is Royce’s formulation of the great doctrine of the atonement—an idea, Royce says, which “if there were no Christianity would have to be invented before the higher levels of our moral existence could be fairly understood.”[4] There is atonement, Royce proceeds, when a creative deed is made possible by a treason and when “the world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had that deed of treason not been done at all.”[5] Atonement, in this sense, as he rightly asserts, is a fact “as familiar and empirical as death or grief.”[6] Evidently, this teaching interprets the experience of a suffering and atoning God as truly as it describes a human consciousness, but—true to the arbitrary limits which he has set to his discussion—Royce simply ‘ignores’ atonement ‘as between God and man.’[7]
(d) There is little time, and probably little need, to summarize Royce’s description of the Church, or ‘Beloved Community.’ The meaning of the term ‘community’ is precisely stated and richly illustrated. ‘There are,’ Royce points out, “in the human world two profoundly different grades, or levels, of mental beings—namely the beings that we usually call human individuals and the beings that we call communities. … Of the second of these levels, a well-trained chorus, … or an athletic team during a contest, or a committee in deliberation …—all these are good examples.”[8] “And yet a community is not,” Royce repeatedly
- ↑ The World and the Individual, II, p. 350; Problem of Christianity, I, p. 252.
- ↑ The Problem of Christianity, I, p. 242.
- ↑ It is beside the purpose of this paper to stress the fact that in spite of Royce’s over-emphasis of the Pauline factor of Christianity he explicitly adopts Jesus’s teaching about sin rather than Paul’s. Cf. Problem of Christianity, I, pp. 225, 227 ff.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 271 et al.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 307 f.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 304.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 305.
- ↑ The Problem of Christianity, I, pp. 164–165.
